Daugherty: All-Star game brings back memories

Jul. 16, 2013

American League All-Star pinch-hitter Reggie Jackson of the Oakland Athletics hits a two-run home run in the third inning against the National League in this July 13, 1971 file photo in Detroit. National League pitcher Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates and catcher Johnny Bench of the Cincinnati Reds look on. / AP Photo

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On the morning of the best All-Star Game ever, I hopped on my bike and rode a couple miles to the hotel where I knew they had a newspaper box. I did this every morning in the summer of 1971, when baseball and I became best friends and fell in love.

I was a 13-year-old, spending the summer on Cape Cod. Then as now, I was a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. We owned a house on the Cape, but didn’t get a daily paper. Armed with a quarter, I’d motivate to the honor box and buy a Cape Cod Times, expressly to see how my Buccos had done the night before, and whom they’d be playing that night.

I’d left all my friends in suburban Washington D.C. behind for the summer. My dad came up on weekends. My brother, who was 16 and thought changing tires for $100 a week was the greatest job in the universe, came up not at all. It was me, my mother, my sister, and baseball.

Lots of summer is spent flat on your back, staring at the sky. At least that’s how it ought to be spent, when you are 13. Boredom isn’t a drag. It’s a lifestyle, a reason to invent and create and imagine. Boredom is good. I spent hours on my back that summer, watching clouds.

A few days before the All Star Game, Pirates ace Dock Ellis said he wouldn’t be starting the game, even though he deserved it. Ellis reasoned that Baseball “wouldn’t start two brothers,’’ and the AL was going with Vida Blue, another African-American. Ellis was wrong, of course. He was in the game long enough for Reggie Jackson to hit a home run that would have left Tiger Stadium, if it hadn’t struck the light tower in right field.

I don’t remember who won the game. I remember the evening, though. Warm and languid. (No AC at the Cape house). Quiet, because my mother and sister were asleep. The 13-inch, black and white TV, perched on the kitchen counter. Me, leaning precariously south, on the back two legs of a kitchen chair, my feet propped on the counter, my scorebook in my lap.

This is how we fall in love sometimes. Without really knowing.

Baseball’s annual tribute to itself works best because baseball is an individual sport. Its team aspect matters. The sheer number of games makes every player an MVP at some point. And often, one hitter’s success is tied to another’s. But ballplayers are independent contractors. Unlike football or even basketball, individual competitions decide lots of baseball games. Only a football quarterback has as much control over a game as a starting pitcher.

In 1971, 21 of the 58 players picked were future Hall of Famers. Willie Mays led off for the NL; Hank Aaron hit 2nd. Pete Rose was a reserve. So was Roberto Clemente.

There was a kid or two out there Tuesday night, watching the game. You might know him. His friends are a million miles away, he’s stuck for the summer in a vacation house. He’s on a bored bender, just staring at clouds. He doesn’t realize what a great time of life he’s in. But he will.

I had other good times that summer of ‘71: Making the drive with our retired neighbor, from our town of Eastham, to Falmouth and Harwich and Chatham, to watch the Orleans Cardinals play in the venerable Cape Cod League; riding my bike to the carnival, where I won cigarettes on the midway; chasing minnows in the tidal pools at Skaket Beach on Cape Cod Bay. Eating lobsters on Nauset Beach, astride the freezing, raging Atlantic.

And baseball. That All Star Game. A flickering little TV in the kitchen, giving light to my passion. A passion that never has burned more brightly.

We sold the house in Eastham after that summer. My mother couldn’t bear to rent it out. Without rental income, we couldn’t afford it. We didn’t get up there enough to make the investment worthy. It was the only summer we had it. I remember that summer, more than any other before or since. When baseball was a companion, and the All Star Game shone like diamonds in the midsummer sky.